1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a method, system and software product used in the area of computer-aided engineering analysis, more particularly to simulating inflation of an enclosed volume with flexible boundary using gas particles.
2. Description of the Related Art
Continuum mechanics has been used for simulating continuous matter such as solids and fluids (i.e., liquids and gases). Differential equations are employed in solving problems in continuum mechanics. Many numerical procedures have been used. One of the most popular methods is finite element analysis (FEA), which is a computerized method widely used in industry to model and solve engineering problems relating to complex systems such as three-dimensional non-linear structural design and analysis. FEA derives its name from the manner in which the geometry of the object under consideration is specified. With the advent of the modern digital computer, FEA has been implemented as FEA software. Basically, the FEA software is provided with a model of the geometric description and the associated material properties at each point within the model. In this model, the geometry of the system under analysis is represented by solids, shells and beams of various sizes, which are called elements. The vertices of the elements are referred to as nodes. The model is comprised of a finite number of elements, which are assigned a material name to associate with material properties. The model thus represents the physical space occupied by the object under analysis along with its immediate surroundings. The FEA software then refers to a table in which the properties (e.g., stress-strain constitutive equation, Young's modulus, Poisson's ratio, thermo-conductivity) of each material type are tabulated. Additionally, the conditions at the boundary of the object (i.e., loadings, physical constraints, etc.) are specified. In this fashion a model of the object and its environment is created.
One of the most challenging FEA tasks is to simulate an impact event such as car crash or metal forming. As the modern computer improves, engineers not only wish to simulate the vehicle behavior in a car crash, they also want to simulate the occupant safety device such as airbag. However, inflating an airbag during a car crash is not suitable by solving a continuum mechanics problem. Today, one of the methods used for simulating airbag deployment is to apply a layer of artificially created pressure on the shell elements that represent the airbag numerically. As a result, the simulation of airbag is not very realistic in the current approach based on continuum mechanics.
It is therefore desirable to have new improved method and system for simulating inflation of an enclosed volume with flexible boundary (e.g., an airbag in a vehicle).